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<DIV>Hi,</DIV>
<DIV>Tony: My understanding is that a fork is precisely what you’re talking
about, code, in this case for a speech synth, which has a common ancestor but
which have branched off into different products, in this case MITalk which
branched off into DECTalk etc. It’s like Twitter clients today, Qwitter has
independently morphed into Chicken Nugget, while forks of Qwitter, I.E. the Qube
and TWBlue have their own quirks and improvements. The only time it wouldn’t be
a fork is if it were completely rewritten from the ground up, which I suppose is
also possible (Apollo and Orpheus come to mind here). I know a lot of people
take “forks” to be simply rebranded copies and so the word has somehow harboured
negative connotations since, but a fork is simply taking a common codebase and
branching it out from the original, whether you make your own improvements or
not.</DIV>
<DIV>Josh. Regarding Eloquence, I said “sounds like”. Obviously having no access
to either of the codebases I can’t say with 100% certainty that they are forks.
I’m saying that, from an audible point of view, they sound like they are either
forks, or at least one was written specifically to have the audible qualities of
the other. The only difference is that Keynote has very expressional pitch
changes, and sounds slightly more...Distorted isn’t the word I’m looking for,
but it’s the closest I can think of right now. Eloquence, on the other hand,
sounds slightly smoother, but its expression is lousy unless you really tweak at
the intonation parameters, at which point it sounds a bit too
enthusiastic.</DIV>
<DIV>Am I right in thinking that Keynote is older than Eloquence? Never managed
to find the history behind those two synths so don’t even have an idea as to
what motivated them or how they came to be. I know Eloquence began its life as
ViaVoice, and that’s all.</DIV>
<DIV>I do remember at one point, when my ears weren’t so tuned into speech
synthesis, I had this weird belief that Eloquence was DECTalk’s successor. I can
kind of see why, if you really, and I mean really, tweaked DECTalk, you could
get it to sound at least slightly like Eloquence, but it does take a lot of
tweaking and even then it isn’t that accurate. In fact, I’d say, while their
voices are completely different, I think at least Keynote and DECTalk are alike
in their delivery of expression and intonation.</DIV>
<DIV>Cheers.<BR>Damien.<BR></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT size=3 face=Calibri></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #f5f5f5">
<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=joshknnd1982@gmail.com
href="mailto:joshknnd1982@gmail.com">Josh Kennedy</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Monday, March 19, 2018 12:30 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=dectalk@bluegrasspals.com
href="mailto:dectalk@bluegrasspals.com">DECtalk</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Re: [DECtalk] The Quest to Save Stephen Hawking's
Voice</DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
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<P class=MsoNormal>Really? Eloquence is a fork of keynote? How can you say that?
</P>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Sent from <A
href="https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986">Mail</A> for Windows
10</P>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P>
<DIV
style="BORDER-TOP: #e1e1e1 1pt solid; BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0in; PADDING-TOP: 3pt; PADDING-LEFT: 0in; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; PADDING-RIGHT: 0in; mso-element: para-border-div">
<P class=MsoNormal
style="BORDER-TOP: medium none; BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0in; PADDING-TOP: 0in; PADDING-LEFT: 0in; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; PADDING-RIGHT: 0in"><B>From:
</B><A href="mailto:tmorales2000@gmail.com">Tony Morales</A><BR><B>Sent:
</B>Sunday, March 18, 2018 19:25<BR><B>To: </B><A
href="mailto:dectalk@bluegrasspals.com">DECtalk</A><BR><B>Subject: </B>Re:
[DECtalk] The Quest to Save Stephen Hawking's Voice</P></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal>They sound similar because they have a common
ancestor--MITalk.<o:p></o:p></P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>30. The MIT MITalk system, by Jonathan Allen, Sheri
Hunnicutt, and Dennis Klatt, 1979.<o:p></o:p></P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><A
href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/AUfiles/30.AU">http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/AUfiles/30.AU</A><o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>32. The Speech Plus Inc. `` Prose-2000'' commercial system,
1982.<o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><A
href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/AUfiles/32.AU">http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/AUfiles/32.AU</A><o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>33. The Klattalk system, by Dennis Klatt of MIT, which formed
the basis for Digital Equipment Corporation's DECtalk commercial system, 1983.
<o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><A
href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/AUfiles/33.AU">http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/AUfiles/33.AU</A><o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>Audio samples from Klatt's History of Speech
Synthesis.<o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>Thanks,<o:p></o:p></P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>Tony<o:p></o:p></P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><BR><BR><o:p></o:p></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 5pt; MARGIN-TOP: 5pt">
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>On Mar 18, 2018, at 4:04 PM, Damien Garwood <<A
href="mailto:damien@dcpendleton.plus.com">damien@dcpendleton.plus.com</A>>
wrote:<o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><o:p></o:p> </P>
<DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>Hi,<BR>You know, hearing the samples in that article, I
can't say I would be surprised if DECTalk was almost a fork of that synth.
Just like it sounds like Eloquence is a fork of Keynote, and ESpeak is a fork
of Orpheus (if not the vocal properties, then at least the dictionary and
stress rules).<BR>Let us hope that this sees a resurgeance of interest on
formant synthesis, as concat synthesis, which currently seems to be dominating
the TTS market, just doesn't cut it for screen readers in my opinion.<BR>As
for Stephen Hawking. May he rest in peace, may his spirit be in a happier
place, may his great work be remembered, may his confidence shine through
others, may his battles for accessibility continue to be fought, and may his
voice be preserved forever as a reminder of the progress that was made in his
lifetime in order to live a rich and fulfilling life despite his
disabilities.<BR>Cheers.<BR>Damien.<BR>-----Original Message----- From: Jayson
Smith<BR>Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2018 10:04 PM<BR>To: DECtalk
Discussions<BR>Subject: [DECtalk] The Quest to Save Stephen Hawking's
Voice<BR><BR>Here's an interesting article I thought some of you might
like.<BR><BR><BR>Jayson<BR><BR><BR>--------------------<BR><BR><BR>The quest
to save Stephen Hawking's voice<BR>How a Silicon Valley team helped rebuild
his distinctive robotic sound<BR>By Jason Fagone<BR><BR>Eric Dorsey, a
62-year-old engineer in Palo Alto, was watching TV<BR>Tuesday night when he
started getting texts that Stephen Hawking had<BR>died. He turned on the news
and saw clips of the famed physicist<BR>speaking in his iconic android voice —
the voice that Dorsey had spent<BR>so much time as a young man helping to
create, and then, much later, to<BR>save from destruction.<BR><BR>Dorsey and
Hawking had first met nearly 30 years earlier to the day. In<BR>March 1988,
Hawking was visiting UC Berkeley during a three-week
lecture<BR>tour.<BR><BR>At 46, Hawking was already famous for his discoveries
about quantum<BR>physics and black holes, but not as famous as he was about to
be. His<BR>best-seller, “A Brief History of Time,” was a week away from
release,<BR>and Californians were curious about this British professor from
the<BR>University of Cambridge, packing the seats of his public
talks,<BR>approaching him at meals. Hawking motored into buildings and onto
stages<BR>in a wheelchair with a seat of maroon sheepskin, zooming around with
the<BR>nudge of a joystick, grinning as he left journalists and his nurses
in<BR>the dust.<BR><BR>When he spoke, it was in the voice of a robot, a voice
that emerged from<BR>a gray box fixed to the back of his chair. The voice
synthesizer, a<BR>commercial product known as the CallText 5010, was a novelty
then, not<BR>yet a part of his identity; he’d begun using it just three years
before,<BR>after the motor neuron disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis stole
his<BR>ability to speak. Hawking selected bits of text on a video screen
by<BR>moving his cheek, and the CallText turned the text into speech. At
the<BR>start of one lecture, Hawking joked about it: “The only problem,”
he<BR>said, to big laughs, “is that it gives me an American
accent.”<BR><BR>Dorsey was with Hawking for part of that trip, tagging along
as a sort<BR>of authority on the voice, explaining its workings to
journalists. He<BR>worked at the Mountain View company that manufactured the
CallText 5010,<BR>a hardware board with two computer chips running custom
software.<BR><BR>An upbeat 32-year-old, Dorsey was quiet by nature, but
driven. He had<BR>joined Speech Plus as an intern, attracted by its mission to
help the<BR>voiceless and the disabled; now he led a team of engineers, and at
least<BR>20,000 lines of his own code were in the CallText, the product that
gave<BR>voice to the most celebrated scientist of his era.<BR><BR>“We are
getting close to answering the age-old questions,” Hawking said<BR>at the
close of a lecture. “Why are we here? Where did we come from?<BR>Thank you for
listening to me.”<BR><BR>At the end of his California tour, the physicist gave
Dorsey a signed<BR>copy of his new book, his thumbprint pressed onto the
inside cover.<BR><BR>Hawking returned to Cambridge, Dorsey to his life in
California.<BR><BR>Twenty-six years went by before they would cross paths
again.<BR><BR>In tech years, that is a millennium. The Internet happened.
Silicon<BR>Valley boomed, busted, boomed again. Apple, Amazon, Facebook,
Google, Uber.<BR><BR>Dorsey, meanwhile, left Speech Plus, which went bankrupt
and was sold to<BR>a series of other companies. He got married and had kids.
He joined a<BR>Buddhist temple. He eventually left the field of speech
technology<BR>altogether, becoming an engineering leader at DVR maker
TiVo.<BR><BR>Tech, he’d learned, moves so fast. “There’s a new iPhone every
year,”<BR>Dorsey says. “Everything just kind of gets buried in the dustbin
of<BR>history very, very quickly.”<BR><BR>That’s why, when an email from
Cambridge University arrived out of the<BR>blue in 2014, Dorsey was surprised.
It came from Hawking’s technical<BR>assistant, Jonathan Wood, who was
responsible for Hawking’s<BR>communications systems.<BR><BR>Wood explained
something so improbable that Dorsey had trouble<BR>understanding at first:
Hawking was still using the CallText 5010 speech<BR>synthesizer, a version
last upgraded in 1986. In nearly 30 years, he had<BR>never switched to newer
technology. Hawking liked the voice just the way<BR>it was, and had stubbornly
refused other options. But now the hardware<BR>was showing wear and tear. If
it failed entirely, his distinctive voice<BR>would be lost to the
ages.<BR><BR>The solution, Wood believed, was to replicate the decaying
hardware in<BR>new software, to somehow transplant a 30-year-old voice
synthesizer into<BR>a modern laptop — without changing the sound of the voice.
For years, he<BR>and several colleagues in Cambridge had been exploring
different<BR>approaches. What did Dorsey think?<BR><BR>Thirty years old? He
thought. Oh, my God.<BR><BR>It wouldn’t be easy. They might have to locate the
old source code. They<BR>might have to find the original chips and the manuals
for those chips.<BR>They couldn’t buy them anymore, the companies don’t exist.
Solving the<BR>problem might mean mounting an archaeological dig through an
antiquated<BR>era of technology.<BR><BR>But it was for Stephen
Hawking.<BR><BR>“Let’s get it done,” Dorsey
said.<BR><BR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<BR><BR>The
poet Longfellow once wrote that the human voice is “the organ of the<BR>soul.”
More than any other part of us, our voice expresses who we are,<BR>and the
smallest fluctuations swing meaning in ways that are hard for<BR>computers to
understand. You speak a sentence, and the intonation rises<BR>or falls
depending on whether you’re making a statement or asking a<BR>question. You do
it without thinking, but a computer has to make a guess.<BR><BR>Today’s
synthesized voices, like Apple’s Siri, rely on prerecorded<BR>libraries of
natural sound. Voice actors record huge libraries of words<BR>and syllables,
and software chops them up and reassembles them into<BR>sentences on the fly.
But 30 years ago, computers could only produce a<BR>“stick-figure version” of
a human voice, says Patti Price, a speech<BR>recognition specialist and
linguist in Palo Alto.<BR><BR>Back then, she worked as a postdoc in the
Massachusetts Institute of<BR>Technology lab of Dennis Klatt, a tall, thin,
opera-loving scientist<BR>originally from Wisconsin. Klatt is the godfather of
Hawking’s voice. He<BR>blasted his own throat with X-rays to measure the shape
of his voice box<BR>as he articulated certain sounds, and then developed a
software model of<BR>speech, the Klatt Model, based on his own
voice.<BR><BR>Speech Plus took Klatt’s model, improved on it, and
commercialized it in<BR>various products, including the CallText 5010. One of
Dorsey’s<BR>contributions was to write an algorithm that controlled the
intonation<BR>of the voice, the rise and fall of words and sentences. Speech
Plus<BR>would sell thousands of CallText systems, though many
customers<BR>complained that the voice sounded too robotic.<BR><BR>But Hawking
liked it.<BR><BR>True, it was robotic, but he appreciated that it was easy to
understand:<BR>“noise-robust,” as Price explains. The shape of its waveform
was more<BR>like a series of plateaus than the steep mountain cliffs of
human<BR>voices, which fall off more sharply. The flattish slope of
Hawking’s<BR>voice made it cut through noise in amphitheaters and lecture
halls. He<BR>often began his speeches with the same line — “Can you hear me?”
— and<BR>the audience would respond with an enthusiastic “Yes!”<BR><BR>“It’s
got a ring to it that sticks out,” Price says.<BR><BR>“It’s very
intelligible,” Dorsey says. “You can listen to it for a long<BR>time, and it’s
not irritating.”<BR><BR>Hawking’s only complaint was that it didn’t have a
British accent.<BR><BR>Over the years, as synthetic voices grew more natural,
taking advantage<BR>of faster chips and cheap storage, Hawking had chances to
upgrade. In<BR>1996, a Massachusetts speech technology company called Nuance,
which had<BR>acquired the remains of Speech Plus, upgraded the CallText with
evolved<BR>software code that made the voice sound fuller and faster, less
robotic,<BR>with shorter pauses between sentences — to the engineers, an
obvious<BR>improvement.<BR><BR>They sent Hawking a sample of the new voice,
thinking he’d be pleased.<BR>He was not. He said the intonation wasn’t right.
He preferred the 1986<BR>voice, the one modulated by Dorsey’s intonation
algorithm. Hawking would<BR>stick with that one.<BR><BR>“I keep it because I
have not heard a voice I like better,” he once<BR>said, “and because I have
identified with it.” He could change to a<BR>smoother voice, but then he
wouldn’t sound like himself.<BR><BR>“To Stephen, his equipment is like a part
of his body,” said Wood, his<BR>chief technical aide. “To upgrade him to a new
piece of software or a<BR>new piece of hardware … he’s having to change a
physical part of
himself.”<BR><BR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<BR><BR>Starting
around 2009, Wood and several others at Cambridge began trying<BR>to separate
Hawking’s voice from the failing CallText hardware. The<BR>group would
included Peter Benie, a computer guru at the university;<BR>Pawel Wozniak, a
local engineering student; and Mark Green, an<BR>experienced electrical
engineer with Intel, which had a long<BR>relationship with Hawking.<BR><BR>One
option they considered was tweaking a modern synthetic voice like<BR>Siri to
sound more like Hawking. But Siri-type systems rely on the vast<BR>computer
power of Internet clouds, and Hawking couldn’t be constantly<BR>tethered to
the Internet. Benie also tried a completely different<BR>approach. He wrote a
software emulator for the CallText — essentially a<BR>program that would fool
a modern PC into thinking it was actually the<BR>old CallText. But the samples
it produced didn’t sound faithful enough<BR>for Hawking’s taste.<BR><BR>By the
time Cambridge reached out to Dorsey in 2014, they were<BR>investigating a
third avenue: track down the old CallText source code,<BR>now owned by Nuance,
and port it to Hawking’s laptop, transplanting the<BR>old voice into a fresh
new body.<BR><BR>Was it possible? Dorsey had no idea. It depended on whether
he could<BR>find the source code, or, failing that, information that would let
him<BR>reverse-engineer the source code.<BR><BR>He started emailing colleagues
he hadn’t seen in 30 years, asking if<BR>they had any CallText bric-a-brac
still laying around: boards, chips,<BR>manuals. One guy found an actual
CallText board in his garage. Others<BR>located dusty schematics.<BR><BR>It
had the feel of a mad scramble through an earlier era of technology.<BR>But
people everywhere leaped at the chance to help. “The goal is to save<BR>his
voice,” Dorsey said. “Once you go to somebody — ‘I need you to help<BR>save
Stephen Hawking’s voice’ — they immediately wake up.”<BR><BR>His closest
collaborator in Palo Alto soon became Price, the speech<BR>technologist who
had once studied with Klatt, the godfather of Hawking’s<BR>voice. She was a
master at analyzing audio samples, comparing one to<BR>another and using their
audio fingerprints to reverse engineer how they<BR>must have been
created.<BR><BR>Dorsey’s archaeological quest for old code turned out to be
a<BR>frustrating one. No one at Nuance was able to find the source code
from<BR>the 1986 version of CallText. They did, however, find the code for
the<BR>upgraded 1996 version of the voice, on a backup tape in an office
in<BR>Belgium. After a few months of work, Nuance engineers got the code
up<BR>and running and sent a series of audio samples to Hawking’s
team,<BR>adjusting the program to try to match the 1986 voice.<BR><BR>It
didn’t quite work. For one thing, the match was close but not<BR>perfect.
Hawking flagged subtle differences others had trouble<BR>discerning. “It’s
like recognizing your mother’s voice,” Price said.<BR>“When you hear them over
the phone, they say two syllables and you know<BR>if that’s right or
not.”<BR><BR>The other issue was that Nuance owned the code, not Hawking. The
famed<BR>physicist had always been intent on controlling the use of his
own<BR>voice. If the team avoided using proprietary software, Hawking
was<BR>likely to have more
control.<BR><BR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<BR><BR>At
this point, they switched tacks and returned to one of their
original<BR>ideas: to emulate the CallText in software, similar to how PCs
can<BR>emulate old Nintendo games that aren’t sold anymore.<BR><BR>The
CallText, of course, was a more intricate beast than a Nintendo,<BR>driven by
two obsolete and complexly interacting chips, one made by<BR>Intel and the
other by NEC. Building the emulator demanded heroic feats<BR>of programming,
intuition and high-tech surgery. The chips had to be<BR>removed from a spare
CallText board with tweezers and a screwdriver. An<BR>emulator for the Intel
chip had to be written from scratch, by Benie. A<BR>separate emulator, for the
NEC, was borrowed from an open-source<BR>Nintendo emulator called
Higan.<BR><BR>Then all these disparate pieces had to be glued together. It was
a<BR>little like doing a jigsaw puzzle in a dark room. One chip was passing
a<BR>mysterious packet to the other every 10 milliseconds. Why? What was in
it?<BR><BR>For a while, it was tough going. Some of the audio samples were so
poor<BR>that no one dared play them for Hawking.<BR><BR>The breakthrough came
just before Christmas 2017, when the emulator<BR>finally started producing
sounds that resembled the familiar voice they<BR>had been chasing. It had some
minor glitches, but according to Price,<BR>the voice was an acoustical match
to Hawking’s, the waveforms virtually<BR>identical. The only perceptible
difference was a lack of analog buzz.<BR>“It’s like a clean and shiny
scrubbed-up version of his voice,” Price says.<BR><BR>When Benie heard it for
the first time, coming out of a computer instead<BR>of Hawking’s voice box, he
thought it sounded more American than<BR>Hawking’s voice. It was just an aural
illusion. Benie realized that<BR>perhaps, whenever he saw Hawking speak, he
had been mentally adding a<BR>hint of Britishness.<BR><BR>Over the next weeks,
in Cambridge and Palo Alto, the team members<BR>continued to debug the new
voice, feeding it snippets of old Hawking<BR>speeches and sample texts full of
random commas, listening to the results.<BR><BR>On Jan. 17, the team felt
ready to demonstrate the new voice for<BR>Hawking. Wood, Wozniak, and Benie
went to Hawking’s home in Cambridge<BR>and played him samples on a Linux
laptop. To the team’s relief and<BR>happiness, Hawking gave his blessing. It
did sound like his voice.<BR><BR>They still needed to port the voice to the
PC, so temporarily, Wood<BR>loaded a version of the voice onto a miniature
hardware board known as a<BR>Raspberry Pi. He thought Hawking might want to
evaluate the voice in<BR>everyday life, and the Pi was the quickest way to get
him up and running.<BR><BR>On Jan. 26, Wood took the Pi along to Hawking’s
house and asked if he’d<BR>like to try it out. Hawking raised his eyebrows,
which meant “yes.”<BR><BR>The team put the Pi in a tiny black box, attached it
to Hawking’s chair<BR>with Velcro, and plugged it into the voice box. Then
they disconnected<BR>the CallText. For the first time in 33 years, Hawking was
able to speak<BR>without it.<BR><BR>Wood watched eagerly for Hawking’s
reaction.<BR><BR>“I love it,” Hawking said.<BR><BR>For the next few weeks in
private conversations, Hawking continued to<BR>speak through the emulator and
the Raspberry Pi, chatting happily with<BR>friends and colleagues. Wood said,
“It was a pleasure to be able to give<BR>him something like that, that so many
people have worked on for so many<BR>years.”<BR><BR>All that remained, the
final step in the project, was to get the PC<BR>version, still a bit buggy,
working smoothly. But after a few more code<BR>revisions, it was finally
bug-free.<BR><BR>“We had pretty much completed all the technical hurdles,”
Dorsey said.<BR>“Everybody felt, finally, this is it, it’s going to work, this
is done.”<BR><BR>And that is when Hawking got sick, in
February.<BR><BR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<BR><BR>According
to Wood, Hawking continued using the emulator until his final<BR>days. He was
able to talk with his loved ones and caregivers with the<BR>new software on
the Raspberry Pi. The last words he spoke while wired<BR>into his chair,
whatever they were, he spoke with a version of his voice<BR>that lives only in
code, potentially deathless bits and bytes.<BR><BR>Everyone on the project
understood that Hawking might not live long<BR>enough to get much use out of
the emulator. He had been sick before, but<BR>always recovered. In 2014, when
Wood first contacted Dorsey, Hawking was<BR>72. They decided, though, that his
CallText boards could keel over in<BR>six months, while Hawking might live to
80.<BR><BR>Along with sadness at Hawking’s death, Dorsey can’t help feeling
some<BR>disappointment. He and the team had raced for years to build
a<BR>complicated thing that had worked beautifully, but now sat
idle.<BR><BR>At the same time, the project brought him back to his younger
self, the<BR>guy who wanted to use engineering to perform good deeds and help
people.<BR>All those years ago, working on the intonation algorithm in
the<BR>CallText, he couldn’t imagine that it would end up helping define
a<BR>genius of science to the world, and even to himself.<BR><BR>Tech changes
fast. Most machines end up as dust, and when we die, our<BR>voices die with
us. Hawking’s voice is different. The original CallText<BR>boards have passed
to his estate, to use as his family wishes. So has<BR>the new software, the
CallText emulator, which can be ported to future<BR>platforms as they are
invented.<BR><BR>Hawking was, famously, an atheist, skeptical of the
afterlife; “We have<BR>this one life to appreciate the grand design of this
universe,” he once<BR>said, “and for that, I am extremely grateful.” But there
is no longer<BR>any physical reason his voice can’t live
forever.<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Dectalk
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